Reimagining Yoga Anatomy

New Weekend Workshop for 2018​Reimagining Yoga Anatomy: The Living Architecture of the Yoga Body

Those of you who've taken Yoga As Medicine, Level 1 know that for years I've been teaching a more holistic way of looking at yoga anatomy. Rather than feeling the need to memorize muscle origins and attachments, what we'll discuss and experience in this 10-hour training is how to think and feel the yoga body more globally. This approach allows you to go deeply into alignment without being fixated on anatomical minutia (though where relevant we'll discuss that too)!

Together, we'll explore the evolving science of biotensegrity, myofascial chaining, and breath-based movement (don't worry if you're not clear on the meaning of some of these terms — all will be explained). I'll be offering this workshop at TriYoga in London as well as at Namaste Yoga in Oakland.

In order for yoga poses (asana) to be maximally safe and therapeutic, they need to be supple, lightly-held and deeply grounded in the breath. Tensegrity is a word popularized by Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome. Rather than being rigidly held, tensegrity structures like domes, bicycle wheels and suspension bridges allow subtle movements (give) that render them more stable, and better able to withstand outside forces.

Tensegrity, or as it's sometimes called in relationship to living beings, biotensegrity, offers an alternative way to understand yoga anatomy. This model explains better than the simple physics of levers and pulleys, the densely interconnected beings we are, in which forces act not just locally but often across the entire body. Adding to the subtlety of biotensegrity structures are the elements of breath and awareness -- and where breath and awareness go, yoga teaches, prana (life force energy) follows.

We'll engage in lecture/discussions, practice mostly gentle, breath-centered yoga, observe each other in poses and try various experiential exercises to deepen our understanding and heighten our awareness. Recommended for yoga teachers, yoga therapists and students with at least a year of regular asana practice.

At the end of this workshop you can expect to have a whole new way of looking at yoga anatomy. As opposed to the standard reductionist way yoga anatomy is typically taught with its analysis of individual muscles and small parts of bones (which is useful but not the whole story), we'll focus on a more global, interconnected analysis of the entire body. We'll examine whole-bone movements, and the bones relationships with each other, and study the effects chaining through the myofascia, and even the flow of "prana," all modulated by the breath.

The workshop will have three central activities: lecture/discussions, practice and in small group and pairs observing bodies in practice. It will be circa 25% lecture, 25% observation and 50% practice.